Clone Wars
We went to see Star Wars: Clone Wars this afternoon, because a weekend spent at Monterey Bay Aquarium and the park with cousins wasn't entertaining enough, or something. (Actually, I'm going to be away for a week, and we sometimes go into hyper-activities mode for a bit before a trip.) Naturally, the kids enjoyed it, but I couldn't shake the feeling that I was watching a bunch of wooden pieces from a novelty Star Wars chess set.
In a way, of course, given George Lucas' notorious inability to get interesting performances out of even really expressive actors (one mustn't blame him for Hayden Christensen, but what other director in history has inspired Samuel L. Jackson to not be a badass), it's a very logical decision to make an animated Star Wars film in which the characters look wooden; it's cinema verité for that universe.
And maybe the hyperkinetic light saber duels are what Lucas always wanted those fights to be like. But the battles are shot using a combination of sweeping, Peter Jackson-like pans and zooms, and Spielberg, Saving Private Ryan-like shaky first person handheld camera views that is, to say the least, inconsistent: the one wants to impress you with the terrible grandeur and awesome courage summoned by war, while the other wants you to smell the vomit and cordite.
The story itself wasn't any worse than any other of the recent Star Wars movies, but talk about the soft bigotry of low expectations....
What I'd really love to see is a series of remakes of the whole series by different directors. If there's one franchise that could survive having competing versions, it's this one. What could John Woo, for example, do with the epic story of friendship and betrayal that is the first three movies? What if someone refashioned Amidala into a seriously complex, interesting character who's actually ten or fifteen years older than Skywalker? I like Natalie Portman, but what could Julianne Moore, or at least Jennifer Anniston, do with the role?
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